“I just wake up and think, I woke up again and nothing has changed, it wasn’t a dream,” Debra told AFP. “I put my feet on the floor and I build a wall around my emotions and I just think about what strength I need for today.”

Marc added: “Honestly, we’re not that interested in who or why, we’re interested in how do we get him back, what is needed to return him to us safely.”

We kill ourselves every day with McDonald’s and alcohol and a thousand other drugs, but we’ve lost the sense that there actually are things out there worth dying for. … So that’s why I came here to Syria, and it’s why I like being here now, right now, right in the middle of a brutal and still uncertain civil war. Every person in this country fighting for their freedom wakes up every day and goes to sleep every night with the knowledge that death could visit them at any moment. They accept that reality as the price of freedom.